Traditional methods for organizing digital files are typically hierarchical in nature. Early text-based methods relied upon directories, sometimes nested within each other. The introduction of graphic user interfaces (GUI) for file organization brought the use of icons to represent individual files and folders to organize those icons. In some cases, folders could be nested. In some cases, but not always, folders had a one-to-one correspondence to file system directories.
Even tagging systems have their limitations, as it can be unclear to which of its various meaning an individual tag should take on or whether that tag should take its meaning of a noun, a verb, or something else altogether, hindering file search functionality.
As more aspects of our lives have gone digital, and as digital footprinting and life-logging become more popular, these traditional GUI elements have not scaled well to deal with large volumes of time stamps and metadata of data files.
Accordingly, there is a need for improved GUI approaches that permit the easy selection and manipulation of large numbers of digital files along with display of their timestamps and metadata.